Thesis-beard Jason
itting cross-legged in a metal desk chair, Jason Woods tells me about his board. It's important. It's motivation.
It's a work in progress, like the thesis it's writing.
To me, it's a scraggy collection of brown hair on a lean guy I met for
the first time jax
five minutes ago.
The Stillwater, Okla,
graduate student is
24 with blue eyes and
gray Puma sneakers.
His beard makes him
look like Shaggy from
Scooby Doo.
"I've been working on it since February," he says about the
beard. "My girlfriend is a big fan."
In his windowless, red-carpeted office in Lindley Hall, he yawns and tells me that a lot of guys promote their goals by not shaving. A beard is a constant reminder of something that needs to get done, like his geography thesis on Kansas City jazz.
"I apologize for being groggy," he says. "I've been working on this all day, it's all I ever do — my thesis. Some weeks I'm like, 'I can't take this.'
He comically snaps forward, grabs his silver laptop and shakes the screen with both hands. "Why won't you write yourself, thesis?" He grimaces at the screen for a moment, then laughs and leans back in the chair again.
"Thesis funk?" she asks, raising her eyebrows. He smiles.
"You got to have something to get through the thesis."
"It's catchy, but women don't have equal rights in it," she says. "I can't have a thesis beard."
Hilary, one of the five students that shares this tiny office, walks in and sits at the desk across from him. A few minutes earlier he jokingly told me Hilary always gives him shit about his beard, so I ask her about it.
"Maybe you can stop bathing," he succeeds.
He laughs. I laugh. We laugh. It seems appropriate. After all, I found Jason because he has my name. And if we share the same name, why shouldn't we share a similar sense of humor?
Joaquin or an admirably boyish one like Johnny. Just Jason.
Jayplay-reporter Jason
It's Greek in origin — think Jason and the Argonauts — and every baby-name Web site and book I've read says it means "healer," which my mom likes. She wanted me to be a doctor. JAY-sen, or, as I have been called during sojourns in Costa Rica and Mexico, JAY-SONE. A name that doesn't lend itself easily to nicknames or rhyming (mason, basin and raisin, nonwithstanding).
Jason Woods tells me about his beard. It's important. It's motivation. It's a work in progress, like the thesis he's writing.
Jason: The eleventh most popular baby name when I was born in 1984, according to the Social Security Administration. I was one of three Jasons in my third grade classroom. And, as curiosity compelled me to discover in January, one of 164 people named Jason at the University of Kansas this semester.
Hi. My name is Jason. Two syllables, five letters — short and simple. It's printed on my driver's license and written at the top of every paper I turn in. It's how I introduce myself and how I sign my email. It's my tag, my title, my designation. Not a flashy name like
So, what's in a name?
A lot.
Namescaninfluence the way people perceive others. A study published in the Journal of Psychology in 1999 found that first names affect how attractive people are perceived to be. Study participants received full-face
photos of males and femalesthatidentified each picture with an "attractive" name (examples of names used include Danielle and Alexander), an unattractive name (Tracey and Kenneth) or without any name. Then the participants
rated each photo for physical attractiveness. The study found that names accounted for 6 percent of the variance in how participants rated the physical attractiveness of the people in the photos. Jason wasn't in the mix of names studied.
And when I discovered that 164 other guys with my name were walking around campus, I was more interested in their personalities than in their attractiveness. Facebook only got me so far. I couldn't meet all of them, so I picked about 25 that caught my interest. Soon I was sending emails and making awkward phone calls. "I know this is going to sound weird, but we have the same name..."
Cycling-enthusiast Jason
Jason Knight tugs down the collar of his grey Mountain Hardware vest to show me his slightly disjointed collarbone."It's gotten better," he says. "It used to be more jailed."
A chemistry graduate student from Shawnee, Okla, he's fit, with trim brown hair and black-rimmed glasses. We're sitting in Budig Hail while he explains the hazy details of the bike crash that
"I remember going around the pile and a white bike pop out, and I tbone it and the next thing I remember is staring at the sky," he says. "When I woke up, the paramedics asked if anything hurt. I said, 'My shoulder kind of hurts.' They looked at it right there and said, 'Oh yeah. That's broke.'"
broke his collar bone two years ago during a downhill sprint race.
Jason is 27, married, and studies "in vivo analysis," which he says involves monitoring how drugs get to where they're supposed to go in organisms. Eventually, he wants to get into microchips.
He likes Lawrence well enough, but he misses Hideaway Pizza, his favorite place to eat back in Stillwater, Okla. He got his undergraduate degree at Stillwater's Oklahoma State University. The slow drivers in Lawrence make him crazy. The roads here should have six lanes, he says with a laugh.
He's currently spending 10 to 20 hours a week preparing for a five-day pro-amateur race in June. He has won a few smaller races, but he likes to think of himself as Mr. Consistent." "don't win much, but I'm always in the top three or top five."
Jason owns five bikes: a race bike, a cross bike, a time-trial bike, a mountain bike and his favorite, a track bike. Track racing is like a cross between NASCAR and running track, except the bikes don't have breaks and the course is steeply banked on all sides.
"It's so pure," he says. "It takes away so many of the variables. It's the only time I've been in the zone. I don't hear the people. I don't see the people. It's just what's going on right around me it's like a high."
Almost-married Jason
Jason Roe is 21 and engaged to be married in June, but right now he's more focused on finishing his honors thesis about the 1918 influenza pandemic. His fiancée, Lindsey, and her mom are making all the wedding arrangements. "Basically, they tell me what they're doing and I say OK. I go along with whatever they want," he says.
We're sitting at a round table in the Kansas Union early on a Friday morning. Roe is about 5-foot-10 and looks like a young Lance Armstrong. He's got a nervous smile that fits his anxious laughter and boyish voice.
Jason grew up in lola. As far as he knows, he's the first person in his family named Jason. William and George are the traditional family names. He did know another Jason from his freshman English class, he says. Every time they saw each other they would say, 'Hi Jason.' "Hi Jason." "We just got a kick out of that," he says. "We would
laugh really hard."
up with it. He pulled out the ring, but before he could propose, she reached across the table, stuck her finger in the ring and said yes. "It's not like I put it on her finger," he jokes. "She was very anxious."
The older, wiser Jason Growing up, Jason Edwards, 44, had
mom had said Jason should present the ring in some sort of chocolate dessert box, so he had the restaurant make a jewelry box out of chocolate. "It had colored flowers and all that stuff on it," he says.
He saw Lindsey for the first time at Mrs.E's when they were freshmen. Jason tried to be cool. He casually checked her out from across the cafeteria. She never knew, he thought. Then, one day, a friend of Lindsey's walked up and dropped a piece of paper in his lap. It had Lindsey's name and phone number written on it. She knew. "I thought I was being subtle, but I guess it was obvious I was looking at her."
Jason and Lindsey's wedding will be in Kansas City on June 21.
For the proposal, he took Lindsey to her favorite Swiss restaurant. Lindsey's
After an awkward phone call and several dates, Jason and Lindsey became a couple. After their first summer together, Jason figured she was the one. "I love spending time with her," he says. "Her personality ended up being what I hoped it would be. It's just good luck, I guess."
Every baby name Web site and book I've read says it means "healer,"
"He is a fine-looking boy," Truman said. Then he walked to Josh and handed him the coin.
The Edwardses framed the coin and hung it in the family room.Jason still has it "My mom gave it to me because my brother isn't as interested in that kind of stuff." he says.
which my mom likes. She wanted me to be a doctor.
a small good-luck coin that President Harry Truman had given his brother when they lived in Independence, Mo. Jason's mom was in the Crown Barber Shop while his older brother Josh got his hair cut. Along came President Truman. He walked in with his cane and took a seat, waiting for the next available chair. Then he turned to Mrs. Edwards and asked, "Is that your boy?"
"Yes."she said.
We're standing in the cavernous main hall at the Dole Institute of Politics, Jason drove from Kansas
City, where he works as senior coordinator for government relations in the office of external affairs at the University of Kansas Medical Campus. He's been a presidential memorabilia enthusiast since his brother's barbershop meeting.
He has seen nine of the 12 presidential libraries in the National
Archives Presidential Library system — Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, the elder Bush and Clinton (he's got Roosevelt, Hoover and Ford left). Bob Dole was never president, but Jason still wanted to see his institute. "It feels very similar to walking into a presidential library," he says. "It kind of reminds me of a chapel."
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